Term 2 – Week 4: Historical Inquiry

Historical Skills	Historical Knowledge
Academic standards:  Year 8: Students can identify questions to frame an historical enquiry. Year 9: When researching, students develop different kinds of questions to frame a historical inquiry. Year 10: When researching, students develop, evaluate and modify questions to frame a historical inquiry.	Academic standard: The environment movement (the 1960s – present) – Significant events and campaigns that contributed to popular awareness of environmental issues

What does that mean? 

Video of lesson

Historical Inquiry: History provides us with a way of thinking about the past. The use of historical inquiry shows students a way to inquire into, organise and explain events that have happened. Historical inquiry is the process of “doing history”.

It is a cyclical process that begins with the asking of guiding historical questions. This process is followed by locating and analysing historical sources to establish historical evidence. The historical evidence is then used to construct historical interpretations that seek to answer the guiding historical questions.

There are six generic questions which you can use to guide your inquiry: 

• What were the major developments during this period? 
  • What, if any, major events happened at the same time. This provides context to the situation to help us understand the mindset at the time. 
• What was an important historical event related to your topic? 
  • For example, the economic position of the USSR led to the creation of nuclear reactors that have positive energy cycles that could lead to explosions. 
  • The USSR also covered up the system weakness in the system, which lead to people pushing the reactor too far. 
• What directly caused that event? 
  • Nuclear Engineers took a reactor too far causing a hydrogen explosion. 
• Who were the key players involved?
• What impact did this have on at the time people?
  • The initial perspectives of the people on the ground (primary sources) 
• How did different perspectives/views shape the understanding of this event?
  • Other people’s interpretations of events (secondary sources) and the impacts over the whole scenario 
• How did these developments impact societies/you? 

Note: In this context, force is talking about things that pressure a historical event into happening. For example, we might be talking about the “market forces” that surround economic recessions. 

What are we going to do with this? 

Worksheet can be found here

Step 1: Plan a topic: 

Write/record a short passage (50 to 100 words long) on what you know about how Chernobyl changed the Environmental Movement. 

If this doesn’t work for you, maybe choose from the following: Some examples: 

• What positive stories could other people tell about my past? 
• Who lived on these lands (Canberra) first, and how do we know? 
• How has the community on these lands changed? What features have been lost and what features have been retained? 
• How has Women’s fashion responded to world war II? (Wartime wardrobes)
• The evolution of the skateboard 
• Your topic from your timeline last week
• Something from your passion project. 

Step 2: Choose the most significant event from your chosen topic and ask the following questions: 

• What was an important historical event related to your topic? 
• What caused that event? 
• Who were the key players involved?
• What impact did this have on the people of the time? 
• How did different perspectives/views shape the understanding of this event?
• How did these developments impact societies/you? 

Note: You need to find some sources to describe the majority of these. 

Step 3: Create or update a timeline and place this event into it

How will you know you are done? 

• You will have chosen a topic 
• You will have written a short description of your topic
• You have answered the questions from above
• You have created/updated a timeline with your event that relates to the subject.

Differences by year levels: 

• Year 8: Students will have reached a level where they can identify and ask core questions and find content that answers those questions. Students will be able to frame questions using historical terms and concepts and identify appropriate sources to validate their position. 
• Year 9: Extend framing questions and develop their own interpretations of the past based off of appropriate evidence and sources; in effect creating their own secondary sources. 
• Year 10: extend above by developing texts and organising and present their arguments using a range of primary and secondary sources.